Is it just me or has this been a particularly suicide-inducing January? It’s like everyone I know is teetering on the brink of sanity, myself pointedly included…

Anyway, thank God for blogging and the distraction it provides from the perils of the January blah’s.

Today, I wanted to start a recurring series… y’see, I was listening to the incomparable Drew Droege’s podcast recently, which you should listen to because it’s amazing and he’s brilliantly funny, and in one of his intro bits recently he went on a tirade against the 90’s, claiming it to be a pop-culturally subpar decade… he singles out grunge, “Toad The Wet Sprocket”, political correctness, “All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”, “Forrest Gump”, Jesus Jones, “Rent” and whack of other things as contributing to this… as a child of the 90’s, I don’t think of it like that all… I thought it was a brilliant decade, I may even go so far as to say it was rich. But there’s likely a little bit of childhood nostalgia talking there…

As someone who probably lived their most pop-culturally formative years in betwixt 2000 and 2010 - what’s becoming increasingly known as “The Aughties” - I can attest that THEY were a pop-cultural wasteland. They were the Bush Presidency, Jessica Simpson & Nick Lachey, “Varsity Blues”, Avril Lavigne, Abercrombie & Fitch, 50 Cent and just so much more garbage that makes my head spin I can barely keep a pulse…

I’ve been known to go on record saying that the only high points about the aughties were The Women of ‘SNL’, Christina Aguilera’s “Stripped” album, the “Legally Blonde” duology, Social Networking, the Rosie O’Donnell regime on “The View” and Golf Shirts… because with my unecessarily broad shoulders, I could wear the FUCK out of a golf shirt.

Anyway… I thought I’d start a series detailing exactly WHY the Aughties were an unendurable nightmare one beat at a time, in no particular order…

Reason the Aughties Sucked #1: JENNIFER LOPEZ

Don’t even get me STARTED on “J Lo” and the indelible scabbing she left on the pop cultural landscape back in the Aughties, and, it seems, persists to this day…

She’s been everywhere this week, specifically. On account of American Idol’s imminent 10th season premiere, which she is now judging - INEXPLICABLY. If she wasn’t replacing Paula Abdul, someone with the melodic pleasantness of a sheep’s quiffe, I SWEAR that this would seem odd… but because they’ve kept the bar depth-defyingly low, no one’s batted an eye that JENNIFER LOPEZ IS BEING PAID MONEY TO JUDGE A COMPETITION IN WHICH THERE IS SINGING. Bizarre.

At any rate, here’s how Jennifer Lopez’s hellish ascent came to be:

She was born in either Crooklyn or The Cronx back in the Summer of Sam (I’m guessing - I’m not here to give you biographical accuracy, just my account of what happened…) and got a gig as one of the “Fly Girls” on a show called “In Living Color” back in the early 90’s… the Fly Girls were to “In Living Color” what the house band is to SNL, sort-of… the other Fly Girls’ went on to great things, too… I believe they counted in their ranks the likes of Rosie Perez, Salma Hayek, Vivica A. Fox and Juliette Binoche… or not… whatever -

Then this Tejano pop superstar named Selena was murdered by her ex-fan-club president and it was a huge deal in that world… and because her story involved beauty, music and murder, a movie was made out of it called “Selena” - enter Jennifer Lopez in her first major role to date.

So there we go - Jennifer Lopez is off to the races… she becomes sexy/street-smart Latina go-to girl of the moment and works her way up the Hollywood chain until she lands opposite George Clooney in the sexy action-adventure thriller “Out of Sight”. I believe she shows side-boob in it.

All the while, she maintains that she “can sing, too”. No one pays much mind to this; certainly not thinking that this is indeed a threat that she is going to carry out… then this bullroar happens:

If You Had My Love.

OHHHH Brother.

She starts dating Puff Daddy who is still Puff Daddy at this juncture in time, starts wearing nude tube dresses, over-sized hoops and fox-furs, cuts an album that isn’t laughed under the table like many other attempted double-threats of the 90’s (Jennifer Love Hewitt anyone? Barenaked?) and all of a sudden, she’s a ‘thing’.

This is where we leave the 90’s.

2001. Second album. Entitled: “J Lo”.

What?

J Lo.

I’m sorry, I still don’t understand?

She took the first letter of her first name, and the first two letters of her last name and made it into a nickname.

WHAT?!?!?! NO ONE HAS EVER FUCKING DONE THAT BEFORE!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!

What follows is many, many, MANY moons of many, many, MANY people doing this to their own names. “J-Lo”-ifying your name in the Aughties was the equivalent to re-spelling your name by substituting vowels for “y” was in the 90’s. Embarassing and not something I foresee coming back, even ironically (although I wouldn’t put anything past hipster’s in the 2020’s…)

Around this time, in the mid-Aughties, there wasn’t a bigger movie star than Jennifer Lopez. She was right up there with Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry and, if you can believe it, Renee Zellwegger as the big-fucking-deal ladies of the time… a title that was cemented when she had the number one album, single and film simultaneously - something that no one had achieved since Barbra Streisand.

Yeah. Jennifer Lopez was on track to be the next Streisand. Cue horseman of the apocalypse.

Happily, she CATAPULTED over the shark in and around ‘03 when she started dating Ben Affleck - a move that directly countered her assertion that she was still “Jenny From The Block”.

This birthed yet another meme that’s still with us: BENIFFER.

They were the first of their kind. Believe it or not, it had never occurred to people to combine a celebrity couple’s names into a singular and unholy portmanteau. Now, it’s Brangelina this, and TomKat that… but then, it was new.

Anyway… after her street-cred was extinguished, demand for her particular brand of R&B/Hip-hop flavored caterwauling cooled, and Jennifer Aniston tidily pushed her from the top of the Rom-Com pyramid with the sheer strength of public pity…

It’s funny - I remember saying back THEN, that Jennifer Lopez was the Paula Abdul of the 2000’s… a lot of people could attest to that, I was adamant.

And now, she’s ACTUALLY taken over Paula Abdul’s gig.

So I guess, for those of you who like book endings, this has been a nice read.

Anyballs - Jennifer Lopez. THE WORST!

—- Aj